Building with MCP and the Claude API
Anthropic’s Alex Albert (Claude Relations), John Welsh (Engineering, MCP team), and Michael Cohen (Engineering, Claude API team) discuss the origins of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems, best practices for getting started with MCP, and how MCP and Claude work together to enable more powerful agentic systems. 00:00 - Introductions 00:30 - What is MCP? 1:30 - The origins of MCP 2:50 - Open sourcing MCP 5:00 - Remote MCP support 6:15: MCP registries 7:40 - Favorite MCPs: Context7 & Playwright 10:40 - Using the Claude API MCP connector 11:50 - Prompt engineering with MCP 14:20 - Best practices for managing context and tools with MCP 18:20 - How John and Michael use MCP servers for project management, home automation, and more 20:00 - Understanding the “emergent” behaviors when Claude and MCP servers work together 22:50 - The future of MCP: growth of the protocol and ecosystem Learn more about MCP: https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro Learn more about the Claude Developer Platform: https://www.claude.com/platform/api Learn more about how to write effective tools for AI agents: https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/writing-tools-for-agents
